Victim recalls night of carjacking
Death felt ‘so close to me,’ when confronted by bombing suspects
BOSTON— The 26-year-old entrepreneur had just pulled his new Mercedes to the curb on Brighton Ave. to answer a text when an old sedan swerved behind him, slamming to a stop. A man in dark clothes got out and approached the passenger window. It was nearly11p.m. last Thursday.
The man rapped on the glass, speaking quickly. Danny, unable to hear him, lowered the window — and the man reached an arm through, unlocked the door, and climbed in, brandishing a silver handgun.
“Don’t be stupid,” he told Danny. He asked if he had followed the news about the previous Monday’s Boston Marathon bombings. Danny had, down to the release of the grainy photos of suspects less than six hours earlier.
“I did that,” said the man, who would later be identified as Tamerlan Tsarnaev. “And I just killed a policeman in Cambridge.”
He ordered Danny to drive, and so Danny’s night of terror began.
In an exclusive interview with the Boston Globe, Danny — who offered his account only on the condition that the Globe not reveal his Chinese name — filled in some of the last missing pieces in the timeline between the murder of MIT police officer Sean Collier, just before 10:30 p.m. on April 18, and the Watertown shoot out that ended just before 1 a.m.
Danny described 90 harrowing minutes, first with the younger brother following in a second car, then with both brothers in the Mercedes, where they openly discussed driving to New York, though Danny could not make out if they were planning another attack. Throughout the ordeal, he did as they asked while silently analyzing every threatened command, every overheard snatch of dialogue for clues about where and when they might kill him.
“Death is so close to me,” Danny recalled thinking. His life had until that moment seemed ascendant, from a province in central China to graduate school at Northeastern University to a Kendall Square start-up. “I don’t want to die,” he thought. “I have a lot of dreams that haven’t come true yet.”
After a zigzagging trek through Brighton, Watertown and back to Cambridge, Danny would seize his chance for escape at the Shell station on Memorial Drive, his break turning on two words — “cash only’’— that had rarely seemed so welcome. When the younger brother, Dzhokhar, was forced to go inside the Shell Food Mart to pay, older brother Tamerlan put his gun in the door pocket to fiddle with a navigation device, letting his guard down briefly after a night on the run. Danny then did what he had been rehearsing in his head. In a flash, he unbuckled his seat belt, opened the door, stepped through, slammed it behind, and sprinted off at an angle that would be a hard shot for any marksman.
“F---!” he heard Tamerlan say, feeling the rush of a near-miss grab at his back, but the man did not follow. Danny reached the haven of a Mobil station across the street, seeking cover in the supply room, shouting for the clerk to call 911.
His quick-thinking escape, authorities say, allowed police to swiftly track down the Mercedes, abating a possible attack by the brothers on New York City and precipitating a wild shoot out in Watertown that would seriously wound one officer, kill Tamerlan, and leave a severely injured Dzhokhar hiding in the neighbourhood. He was caught the following night, ending a harrowing week across Greater Boston.
Danny spoke softly but steadily in a2 1⁄2- hour interview at his Cambridge apartment with a Globe reporter and a Northeastern criminology professor, James Alan Fox, who had counselled Danny after the former graduate student approached his engineering adviser at Northeastern.
Danny, trained as an engineer, made scrupulous mental notes of street signs and passing details, even as he abided the older Tsarnaev’s command not to study his face.
“Don’t look at me!” Tamerlan shouted at one point. “Do you remember my face?”
“No, no, I don’t remember anything,” he said. In the mental chess match that unfolded in the car, Danny played up his outsider status in America and playing down his wealth — he claimed the car was older than it was, and he understated his lease payments — in a desperate hope of extending his life. Danny had come to the United States in 2009 for a master’s degree, graduated in January 2012, and returned to China to await a work visa. He came back two months ago, leasing a Mercedes and moving into a high rise with two Chinese friends while diving into a startup. But he told Tamerlan he was still a student and that he had been here barely a year. Danny’s wild ride came to a conclusion when his SUV needed gas. Tamerlan, now driving after an earlier switch, stopped at an open gas station. Dzhokhar went to fill up using Danny’s credit card, but quickly knocked on the window. “Cash only,” he said, at least at that hour. Tamerlan peeled off $50. Danny watched Dzhokhar head to the store, struggling to decide if this was his moment — until he stopped thinking about it, and let reflexes kick in. In that moment, he jumped out of the car. He sprinted between the passenger side of the Mercedes and the pumps and darted into the street, not looking back, drawn to the Mobil station’s lights. “I didn’t know if it was open or not,” he said. “In that moment, I prayed.”